Snowbound Blues 2013 – Jungle Blues Class

This is a fun little class I had the good opportunity to help in titled, “The Jungle Blues”. I truly heart solo dancing so I was pretty amped when I found out that I would be doing the advanced track of the solo portion of the weekend. While I do enjoy teaching solo dancing for beginners, I know that what really motivates me is when I’m really pushing myself as a teacher and showing what can be possible movement wise in such a short amount of class time. There’s a lot of curating going on for solo classes – what to teach (and what to spend time working details on), what to just show and move on, and ultimately, what to cut altogether.

In terms of choreography and inspiration, I wanted to have one foot in the past and one foot in the present in terms of what types of movement I would be showing. I focused a lot on hips/arm movements that I thought that majority of the dancers could walk away from the class being a little better at while at the same time really being mindful of fundamental vernacular blues movements like fishtails, mooches, boogies, low downs and pivot steps.

Oh et juste pour rire, I threw in a hip thrust in there for good measure. Traditions are hard to break.

Overall I was really happy that most of the participants were able to get the choreography in the 45 or so minutes that I had with them and hope to have more opportunities to do these kinds of mini projects at blues events. I mean, I do this all the time in Montréal… but not everyone can be in my city all the time. Or can they? (see what I did there?).